For the last few days my 2006 scab 5.4l has been shifting really sloppy and its been hard to find gears. Today we went for a drive, came back home and tried to start it again and it could not find any gears, or park or neutral. Then I found that my selector cable had burnt off from being too close to the exhaust manifold. So I'll order a new one and try to get it replaced. NBD. Right now its Sunday afternoon so I'm hooped for the moment

What bothers me is that I cant get the truck to start when I have both the column shifter and the transmission selector lever on the tranny itself in park or neutral. Why is it doing that? Will I continue to have problems once I replace the cable??

To answer that you'll have to find the switch either on the transmission or in the column.

What switch? I've got the column shifter in park and the selector lever on the transmission in what I'm pretty sure is park. I see a little red cable that's nearly as thin as fishing line next to the shifter cable inside the column. Where does that go and what does it do?? Is that the switch you speak of??

EDIT: the little red cable is the indicator linkage.I don't think that is part of the problem.

EDIT: upon further tinkering, it seems that the gear sensor does not reset unless the key is on, so I had to cycle through the gears and then leave it in park with the key in before it would start.

Same thing happened to me. I had to crawl underneath and slide the linkage on the trans into park, everytime I got out of the truck for a week, until the part came in. If i remember correctly, you slide it towards the back of the truck. I could go through the gears one way, so i could still put it into drive, but the cable wouldn't pull the trans back into park.
When i reinstalled the new cable, i wrapped it in heat tape, where it was touching the exhaust. I also zip tied it up off the exhaust with a stainless tie.